Excerpt: Serves to Enlighten our Journey!

Taking a page from his friend and fellow billionaire Warren Buffet, Bill Gates has begun writing an annual letter to discuss candidly the success and failure of his foundation’s grant-making efforts each year. Having spent more than $2 billion in nine years to transform urban education, he has arrived at some conclusions we would do well to take heed of. He writes:

Many of the small schools that we invested in did not improve students’ achievement in any significant way. These tended to be schools that did not take radical steps to change the culture, such as allowing the principal to pick the team of teachers or change the curriculum. We had less success trying to change an existing school than helping to create a new school.

He goes on to state:

But a few of the schools that we funded achieved something amazing. They replaced schools with low expectations and low results with ones that have high expectations and high results. Almost all of these schools are charter schools that have significantly longer school days than other schools. The hope and promise of our traditional school districts lies with their ability to replicate the strategies and results of the schools that have done “something amazing” in high poverty communities.

But these are just some pieces of the puzzle. And while gains are made in some areas, we fall short of the finish line in others. When new principals were brought on last year to lead three failing Detroit public high schools whose teaching staffs had been reconstituted in keeping with No Child Left Behind, they soon learned that they would only be able to hire teachers from the very same schools that had been reconstituted. So teachers were rotated from one school to another, with the expectation of different results.

Principals must be able to hire the very best teachers for kids who need them the most. Our school leaders and teachers can accomplish that within the context of their collective bargaining agreement in ways that are consistent with measurable improvements in student achievement. But if they are unable to change, as Bill Gates has learned, they may be soon be replaced by schools whose leaders are able to cross that hurdle in order to do something amazing.